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Mark Steyn

The axis of torpor

Two more Americans died this week at the hands of one of their Afghan “allies,” a man trained, paid, and armed by the United States. If you slaughter thousands, you can still just about get our attention, as Mullah Omar discovered after 9/11. But the slow bleeding of two deaths here, three deaths there, week after week after week takes a psychological toll, rotting out purpose and strategy. So in Washington this will be a war we “shut down”; in Kandahar and beyond, it will be a war we lost.

As one war “shuts down,” are any others likely to open up? This week Obama told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that “we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” So Tehran, fresh from playing the bad guys in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning blockbuster, is going nuclear? Hey, relax, says the president: “I continue to keep all options on the table.” And, every time he says that, you get the vague feeling he continues to keep the table somewhere in the basement. The best option would be if the Israelis just got on with it, absolving everyone else from a tough decision and simultaneously affording them the deliciously irresistible frisson of denouncing the Zionists for their grossly disproportionate response.

More likely, Iran will be permitted to go nuclear — followed shortly thereafter by Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and anyone else who dislikes being conscripted under the Shia Persian nuclear umbrella. North Korea and Pakistan both anticipate a lively export market…

As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds. A broker America needs to learn to do more with less, and to rediscover the cold calculation of national interest rather than waging war as the world’s largest NGO. In dismissing Paul as a “wacko bird,” John McCain and Lindsey Graham assume that the too-big-to-fail status quo is forever. It’s not; it’s already over.

Blowback

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“As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds.”

The majority of the post-1945 military expeditions have been frustrating and unsatisfactory, not to mention the sacrifices of those who served.

Fighting to win hearts and minds rather than fighting to defeat and destroy the enemy is like that.

The slow bleeding as Steyn states has taken its toll. I mourn the loss of life and the wounded in that wretched place. It almost makes you think that the great military leaders and statesmen of the past were fairy tales because there is no evidence of them being real today.

We have the luck of knowing about history, and the wisdom to have tried to do what others couldn’t.

Where are the jihadis now? We have sent their best to meet their 20 pure females and the remainder are sick of us to the point where they won’t bother us after we leave — as long as we threaten to return should they attempt to do so.

We got Bin Laden because we had troops and bases at hand in Afghanistan. Those helos did not fly off an aircraft carrier to Abottabad — they staged through Afghanistan.

The jihiadis will never be exterminated, but we can set them back so far that they can wish they might have been.

The war has moved on from Afghanistan and Iraq to Yemen and Somalia and Niger, and maybe it’s time we turn our attention to those places…